Justin Berman, regional sales engineer at AlgoSec.
AI has become a double-edged sword for enterprises, increasing the pace and scale of cyber attacks and also speeding up enterprise application delivery, which can increase cyber risk.
This is according to Justin Berman, regional sales engineer at AlgoSec, which positions itself as a leader in application connectivity and network security management, solely distributed in the southern Africa region by Solid8 Technologies.
A key new security challenge facing enterprises is AI-enabled attacks, Berman says. “An example is Mythos AI (Anthropic’s advanced frontier AI model notable for its exceptional, human-surpassing capabilities in cyber security and vulnerability discovery), which has demonstrated unprecedented autonomous coding and offensive cyber attack capabilities. It's finding new ways to run attacks and is incredibly quick to find old attack paths leading to the reality that there is far less time for cyber security teams to pick up an issue and fix problems,” he says.
At the same time, organisations are developing and launching applications faster with the help of AI. Applications are at the core of digital transformation, Berman says. “They provide more ways to connect or purchase, enable enterprises to improve efficiencies and offer new products and services, and help them maintain a competitive edge.
“Many companies are starting to adopt AI even though they don't understand the full risks associated with it. For example, fintech start-ups and smaller banks across Africa may be adopting AI to roll out products and services faster, but the right levels of security are not in place,” he adds.
Berman highlights that the situation is further complicated by public‑facing services, open APIs, overly permissive firewall rules and stale access, which can create vulnerabilities that are often overlooked.
He says managing application connectivity across hybrid environments is becoming increasingly complex for large organisations that have growing numbers of interconnected and disparate systems, plus increasing compliance requirements adding to the challenge.
“Organisations must address these issues on multiple fronts: they must find and reduce attack paths, stop risky changes before production, govern application connectivity, clean up stale and permissive access, secure cloud-native delivery and also produce audit-ready evidence for compliance reporting,” he says.
Berman confirms AlgoSec has a very clear objective to eliminate the pain from managing the security of the hybrid network – defined as an IT infrastructure that combines two or more different types of networking technologies, topologies or computing environments. “We address all of these complexities, using AI to simplify application connectivity security. AlgoSec has evolved its application-centric security platform by embedding AI to simplify application discovery, connectivity analysis, risk prioritisation and policy management.
“We're using AI to identify flows belonging to applications, understanding how systems and applications interconnect with one another and overcoming the challenge of fragmented visibility. AI helps to discover applications automatically, correlate connectivity across fragmented environments and prioritise remediation based on business context.
“We're also using AI to bring in data from many different sources to enable a deeper understanding of risk and translate that into compliance prioritisation. We ensure that everything done in the past is compliant and stays compliant as customers move forward and rapidly adopt and make changes.”
AlgoSec Horizon is an AI-powered, application-centric security management platform that enables organisations to discover applications, understand connectivity, reduce attack paths and automate security policy management across hybrid environments.
“With AlgoSec’s AppViz, we are enabling application-centric visibility and control, business-driven risk and compliance prioritisation, plus AI-driven application change across the hybrid network,” says Berman.
AlgoSec is trusted by South African utilities and enterprises in the banking, fintech, healthcare, retail and education sectors.
AlgoSec, in partnership with Solid8 Technologies, will host Algo Safari customer and partner events in Johannesburg on 28 July and Cape Town on 31July, giving customers and partners an opportunity to see the capabilities of Horizon and AppViz in action.
Visit here to register to attend either of these events.
